Morro Bay High senior Dylan Royer shows young children from the Khayelitsha township how to dribble the ball during a basketball clinic at Inkazimio Primary School near Cape Town in late march.
Autograph pens scribbled on bare skin. Children scrambled for souvenir photos and clutched sweaty scraps of clothing freshly tossed by their virtual celebrities.
The scene was a South African township, and the focus of attention was 11 Central Coast high school basketball players on a goodwill journey. Their mission was to teach the game to young South Africans—and thus offer them something positive in the midst of their otherwise bleak lives.
By the end of their tour as American idols of a different kind, however, it was the San Luis Obispo County players who returned changed for life.
For eight days in late March, the Central Coast teens were floored by neighborhoods of overcrowded shacks and the shabby clothes their young students had to wear. Yet, despite the poverty, the South Africans were inspiring in their positive outlook.
“You can see pictures of shacks and townships, but not until you get there does it really hit home,” said Mission Prep junior Jerry Casey. “There’s thousands of these people living in shacks inches away from each other. They’re all just shoved into one area to kind of be secluded away.
“In the photos, it’s just kind of like, ‘That sucks, that’s how they live.’ But we actually walked through the townships and walked through the houses and saw it ourselves. We experienced it.”
Happy with what they have
The first reaction was innards- juggling shock. Then came pure admiration for the communities of people who reflected happiness despite living without paved roads or widespread electricity, let alone cell phones and iPods.
“Their houses are right next to each other and they’re living in shacks made out of sheet metal,” San Luis Obispo High junior Shane Kennedy said. “Some of them have no electricity and are cooking on little camp stoves. There’s seven people in this little house the size of a bathroom.
“That’s the only thing that really sticks out in my mind. Just seeing how they lived and how they got together and got really excited about a sport, it just sticks out how tightly knit their communities are.”
Led by Tom Mott, Allan Hancock College’s interim athletic director and former Mission Prep boys basketball coach, and sponsored by Mott’s nonprofit 1 Dream Foundation, the Central Coast squad took a trek from Johannesburg to Cape Town and played a four-game series against local teams. One contest was against the South African professional league champion. The players also wrote a series of diaries that appeared in The Tribune.
The 1 Dream Foundation is an organization Mott founded last year aimed at bringing underprivileged students from Africa, Europe and South America to the United States to study and play basketball.
Several of the players who went with Mott to South Africa in March sat down for a roundtable discussion earlier this month to reflect on the trip. In addition to playing, they went on two safaris, toured a gold mine and walked through a former political prison.
But no experience resonated more than the trips to the underdeveloped townships.
Moving experience
“We did a lot of fun things, we did a lot of tourist things,” Mott said. “But I think if you asked anybody who went on the trip the most memorable moment was the last night after the last game. When all the kids were coming up and wanting to take pictures and wanting anything these guys were wearing during the game. They were begging for it.
“When our bus was getting ready to pull out, there was probably a hundred kids on the outside of the bus not wanting us to leave because they didn’t know when the next people would come through their neighborhood and do something for them.”
That was in the Khayelitsha township. The players ran a two-day basketball clinic at the Desmond Tutu Park basketball courts for close to 50 local children, an estimated one-third of whom are infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.
Some children played in shorts. Others wore ripped jeans or full-length pants. Some ran barefoot through basketball drills on the blacktop.
They were the audience for the later games, when their American coaches played with the echoes of their rowdy cheers ringing in their ears.
And in between fun times on the court, the South African locals invited the visitors inside their homes.
“When they gave us a tour through their townships, the kids and families were still smiling and laughing,” San Luis Obispo High junior James Kirschner said. “If you just saw them, you wouldn’t know they were that poor. They just made the most of what they had and that really stuck with me.”
Most places they went, and especially traveling through the townships, players recalled constant showers of smiles and friendly waves.
And since returning, they can’t help but think about the way things ought to be in the United States.
“I just compare everything back there to how we are here and how fortunate we are here,” San Luis Obispo High junior Julian Demalleville said. “People are really stuck up over here, and they shouldn’t be. Because people in Africa have nothing and they’re still happy.
“It really changes you. It’s going to stick with me the rest of my life.”
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